Similarly to @brucexin I needed to get OS-level thread identifier (which != thread.get_ident()) and use something like below not to depend on particular numbers and being amd64-only:
---- 8< ---- (xos.pyx)
"""module xos complements standard module os"""
cdef extern from "<sys/syscall.h>":
long syscall(long number, ...)
const int SYS_gettid
# gettid returns current OS thread identifier.
def gettid():
return syscall(SYS_gettid)
and
---- 8< ---- (test.py)
import pyximport; pyximport.install()
import xos
...
print 'my tid: %d' % xos.gettid()
this depends on Cython though.